Volume 15, numéro 2, 1988

EN :

Funerary lekythos were placed in graves in Greek cemeteries. The use of such huge marble vases as funerary monuments appeared in Greece by the middle of the fifth century and became fashionable until 317 b.c. Lekythos were decorated with paintings or with carved reliefs. The figure of the deceased was represented alone or with his family. The representation often included an inscription and sometimes the figures were identified with their names.

A fragment of one of these lekythos at Laval University represents a farewell scene in low-relief. The author discusses the meaning of the representation, the usual shaking-hands gesture of the figures. Comparisons with dated, better-known funerary lekythos enable the author to propose a date for the Quebec fragment.

EN :

In thirteenth-century France, tympanums were the focus of interest in great portals. With their horizontal registers of reliefs and statues, they displayed major iconographic themes, while jambs and archivolts appeared to be a complementary frame. On the other hand, the multiplication of archivolts created deep recesses at the bottom of which tympanums could seem submissive to their environment.

In the fifteenth century, the flamboyant style stressed both the independence of elements and their intimate interrelations. Prominent elements were mouldings of jambs, arches, and gables of doors, niches, statues, and canopies anywhere. All of them overlapped with tympanums in an intense search for liaisons. Nevertheless, surfaces of tympanums could be defended as independent elements, as they could be of any shape or proportion without regard to the forms of adjacent framing arches.

Quite often, on the other hand, tympanums were rather understressed. They were just treated as true or false windows with open or blind tracery. As such, their submissive placement behind prominent jambs and buttresses must have appeared inferior. They were progressively eliminated as in some cases the tympanum was just either an ambiguous and small part of wall between two superimposed arches, or a taller window or retable above a rather independent doorway. This paved the way for the Renaissance. It marked the end of the medieval tympanum, and the end of the medieval mind as well.

EN :

Two sets of tapestries depicting Puttini can be related to the patronage of the Gonzaga family. On his death in 1563, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga possessed a series of 15 tapestries with Puttini designed by Giulio Romano and woven in the workshop of Nicholas Karcher, probably during his stay in Mantua between 1539 and 1545. The iconography of the four complete surviving panels relates only casually to the description of the puttini in Philostratos’s Images. As the patron of the set, Cardinal Ercole might have wished an emblematic ambiguity for these scenes with reference both to pagan Dionysiac life and to the Christian eucharistic theme of wine. Accordingly, the so-called Bark of Venus might be interpreted in several ways. Ercole’s inventory of 1563 also mentions a set of twelve spallere or dorsal tapestries with “Fortune led by four Eagles.” Giulio Romano’s design in Haarlem, where the woman holding a rudder may stand for Fortuna, can be related to these now lost weavings. As the woman in the Bark of Venus also holds a rudder, she probably alludes to Fortuna leading the good fame of Ercole whose coat of arms appears on the top of the weaving and whose name is written by a genius on a cartellino on the foreground. Moreover, as the general scheme of this tapestry is closely related to that of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes in Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles set, the Bark of Venus/Fortune might be presumed to have an underlying Christian meaning.

Ercole’s younger brother, Ferrante, founder of the Guastalla branch of the Gonzaga family, ordered a similar set of Puttini from the Brussels workshop of Willem de Pannemaker. This can be deduced from correspondence with Cardinal Granvella in 1571-74 concerning a copy of these tapestries from the same weaver. When the painter Giovanni Battista Lodi proposed in February 1552 to entrust Ferrante’s order for tapestries woven with gold and silver to Willem de Pannemaker, he was unquestionably referring to the Marzotto Puttini, the only series with precious metal in the Gonzaga collection, where it can be traced until 1709. Thereafter, the set can be documented in various Venetian collections until it was acquired by its present owner, the Marzotto family in Trissino.

The copies made for Granvella, partially preserved in the Spanish Royal Collection, are identical to the six Marzotto tapestries. Both sets bear the mark of Pannemaker, but the Marzotto tapestries made for Ferrante are the first edition.

The Brussels Puttini set relies on Northern Italian models, either from the workshop of Giulio Romano or from Milanese painters. Unlike the set created for Cardinal Ercole, many details made it clear that the cartoons created for Ferrante were designed in Flanders. The six pieces, representing the harvest of the grapes, the pressing of the wine, and the dance are thus devoted to the theme of Dionysiac paradise and peace as a dialectical complement to Ferrante’s older Brussels set of the Fructus Belli. The building in the right background of the Dance probably represents, at least in an idealized way, the Villa Gualtiera-Simonetta, Ferrante’s residence in Milan.

EN :

The archives of the National Gallery of Canada own some unpublished letters that were written by Edgar Degas to one of his sisters, Thérèse Morbilli. Though these letters have been known to exist and occasionally alluded to in print, this article brings them to public attention, in full, for the first time. As such, they join the very small group of published letters from the artist to his family, documents that reveal the more intimate side of his existence and, not least, an unsuspected concern for the welfare of his kin. Degas seldom dated his letters. Inevitably, this idiosyncrasy has affected some of the editors of his published correspondence, making it necessary to revise the tentative dating once ascribed to some of the letters. Thus, the publication of the documents in Canada is accompanied by a revision of the dates of a number of letters from the published corpus of correspondence.